Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Ladies and Gentlemen

Herzog’s optimistic prediction was justified. In less than a minute it did come back to Captain Teal. The first preliminary crackle of musketry fire brought it back to him with a mighty surge of clamoring, swirling memories. The first whiff of acrid powder smoke in his nostrils, the first sight of those ragged gray uniforms, those dusty blue uniforms, changed the memories into actualities. The weight of sixty years slipped off his shoulders; the rich saps of youth mounted for a little passing time into his pithy marrows, giving swiftness to his rickety legs and strength to his withered arms. It was proof of what an imagination fired by vivid reminders of clanging bygone things could do for an ancient’s body.

Headlong once more into battle went Captain Teal, and as he did he uttered sundry long-drawn wolfish yells, one yell right behind another, until you would have thought, had you been there to listen, that his throat surely must split itself wide open.

In he went, and he took sides. He took the wrong side. That is to say, and speaking from strictly a technical standpoint, he took the wrong side. But from Captain Teal’s standpoint he took the right side and the only side which with honor he might take. To be sure, no one beforehand had advised him specifically in this matter of taking sides. It had been Herzog’s oversight that he had not dwelt more clearly upon this highly important point, which he had assumed his venerable pupil would understand. And now it was Herzog’s handicap, as the Captain’s intention became plain, that Herzog’s hoarsely bellowed commands – commands at the outset but merging swiftly into harsh and agonized outcries – should fall upon that ear of Captain Teal which was his deafer ear.

Not that it would have made any difference to Captain Teal had he been able to hear. With his head back and his parted white whiskers flowing rearward over his shoulders, with the Rebel yell still shrilly and constantly issuing from him, he went in and he took command of those onrushing supernumeraries who wore the gray, and he bade them go with him and give the Yankees hell, and he led them on up the hill to where the blue-clad forces held its crest. Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do or die; which, as may be recalled, was once upon a time precisely and identically the case with other doughty warriors taking part in an earlier onslaught upon the serried field of battle. If, at the last moment their overlords chose to amend the preordained course of events, so be it. Since confusion and chaos were to rule the hour, why then in that case might the best man win. Behold, now, how all drilled plans had suddenly been tossed aside; but at least they had a fit commander to follow after. And at least they knew the purport of that most dwelt-upon and salient order – to smite and spare not. They were lusty lads, these extras, no lustier perhaps than the Unionists yonder awaiting the clash and grapple, but better captained.

And so, while the obedient camera-men kept on grinding, and while Herzog shrieked and impotently danced and finally, casting his megaphone from him, stood and profaned his Maker’s name, Long John Burns led Pickett’s charge, and Gettysburg, after sanguinary losses on both sides, was a Confederate victory, and American history most wondrously was remade.

“Ow!” Mr. Lobel heaved the sorrowful expletive up from his lower stomach spaces. “All them extras to pay for all over again! All them re-takes to be retook. All that money wasted because a crazy old loafer must run – must run – ” He grasped for the proper word.

“Run amuck,” supplied Liebermann, proud of his erudition.

“ – Must run a regular muck. Yes, if you should ask me, one of the worst mucks ever I have seen in my whole life,” continued Mr. Lobel. “And you it was, Gillespie, that stood right here in this office only last Toosday of this week and promised me you should keep down expensives. Who’s a man going to believe in this picture business? I ask you!”

“What of it?” said Gillespie. “It was worth a little money to let the old laddy-boy get the smoke of battle in his nose once more before he dies and have a thrill. I didn’t think so awhile ago when he was rampaging through that flock of extras, but I’m beginning to think so now. We’ll tell him he’s just a trifle too notionate for this game and pay him off – with a wee something on the side for a bonus. If you won’t do it I’ll do it myself out of my own pocket. And then we’ll ship him back to that sleepy little town where he came from. Anyhow, it’s not a total loss, Lobel, remember that. We’re going to salvage something out of the wreck. And we owe the old boy for that.”

“What do you mean, salve something out of it?” inquired Mr. Lobel.

“We grab off that little Clayton girl – the one I tried out in those interior shots yesterday. She’s got it in her, that kid has. I don’t mean brains, although at that I guess she’s about as smart as the average fluffy-head that’s doing ingénues along this coast. But she’s got the stuff in her to put it over. Tell her a thing once and she’s got it. And she screens well. And she’s naturally camera-wise. She’ll go a good way, I predict. And if it hadn’t been for the old man we wouldn’t have her. He practically rammed her down my throat. It seems she’s his cousin, eight or ten times removed, and nothing would do him but that I must hitch her onto the payroll. To get him in the proper humor I had to take her on. But now I’m glad of it. I’ll be wanting a little contract soon for this Clayton, Lobel, so we’ll have her tied up before somebody else begins to want her. Because, sooner or later, somebody else will.”

Traffic swirled past the two Southerners where they stood in a side eddy in the train shed. They were saying good-by, and now all at once the girl felt a curious weakness in her knees as though she were losing a dependable prop.

“I must get aboard,” he said, looking down at her from his greater height. “We’ll be leaving in a minute or so. You need not distress yourself about me, my dear. I could never have been happy for very long in this place – it’s not like our country. These Northern people mean well no doubt; but after all they’re not our people, are they? And this avocation was not suited for one of my years and – and antecedents; that I also realize. I have no regrets. In fact” – a flare lit in his faded old eyes – “in fact, I greatly enjoyed the momentary excitement of once more facing the enemies of our beloved land – even in make-believe. Indeed, I enjoyed it more than I can tell. I shall have that to look back on always – that and the very great pleasure of having known you, my dear.”

He lifted her hand and kissed it and started away, and she saw him going – a picture out of a picture book – through a sudden mist of tears. But he came back for one more farewell passage:

“Remember, my dear,” he said, “that we – you and I – are of the Old South – the land of real gentlemen and real ladies. You’ll remember that always, won’t you?”

And now, with both her arms around him and her lips pressed hard against his ruddy old cheek, she promised him she would.

She meant it, too, at the moment. And perhaps she did and then again perhaps she didn’t. The world she lived in is so full of Tobe Dalys. As the brethren of the leathern pants and the silken neckerchiefs of Hollywood are so fond of saying – those mail-order movie cow-punchers who provide living backgrounds for the Westerns – “Quien sabe?”

Killed with Kindness

Needles and pins, needles and pins, when a man’s married his trouble begins. That’s the way the old application goes. But in the case of Jerome Bracken it didn’t go. After he married, life ran for him on very smooth rollers and there were neither needles nor pins to prick him. Possibly that was because he chose for his wife a virtuous and well-meaning woman, one a bit narrow in her views perhaps and rather stiffly opinionated, as a good many good women are who protect their own tepid moralities behind a quill-work of sharp-pointed prejudices. They are the female porcupines of the human race, being colorless and lethargic in their mentalities but acute and eager when they take a dislike. Still, the porcupine rates high among the animals. While generally not beloved, it generally is respected. And undoubtedly this lady who became Mrs. Jerome Bracken was well-meaning and remained straitly so until the end of all regulated things.

Or then on the other hand, possibly Jerome Bracken’s marriage was a success because he picked precisely the sort of woman who had the qualifications for being a suitable wife to an up-and-coming man, a man who kept on up and kept on coming until he had arrived, with both feet planted on how firm a foundation! But then Jerome always had been, as the phrase is, a clever picker. He proved that when as a very young man he moved to Dyketon and picked Queen Sears for his girl. He kept on proving it – by picking the right business, the right code of deportment before the eyes of mankind, the right church to belong to, and precisely the right father-in-law.

This Queenie Sears, now; she was not the one he married, naturally not. Queenie Sears was not the sort any man in his sane senses would marry, she being what used to be called a fancy woman. She was an inmate of Madam Carrie Rupert’s house when he first met her and it was there, under that hospitable but disreputable roof, down on Front Street in Dyketon’s red-light district, that the meeting took place.

About this first meeting there was nothing significant. He called, a stranger, and she entertained him, it being her business to entertain callers. He at this time was a shrewd but countrified youth of twenty or thereabouts. She was a little older than that, blonde, simple-minded, easy-going, rather pretty in an insipid way, with a weak, self-indulgent mouth. Already she was plump, with the certainty before her that, barring ill health to pull her down, the succeeding years would enhance her plumpness into rolls and cushions of fat. Probably, if the truth were known, she deliberately elected to take on this life she was leading. However, and be that as it may, she had the customary story to account for her present vocation when somebody who was maudlin with a sympathy based on alcohol asked her how she came to be what she was.

Hers was a stock story lacking novelty as well as sincerity – a sentimental fiction dealing with a trusting and ignorant maiden’s downfall in an orange grove vaguely described as being “away down South,” and then discovery and disgrace and a traditional proud father whose heart could be flinty and yet broken, and a shamed girl’s flight in the night and all the rest of the stage props. But sometimes it was a plantation instead of an orange grove; or if the inquirer happened to be a Southerner, it might be a ranch in the far West. Queenie was taking no chances on getting herself checked up.

As for Jerome, his tale was a short one, not particularly interesting but having the merit, as hers did not, of a background of fact. Raised on a farm in the central part of the state; poor parents; common school education; lately landed in Dyketon; stopping now at a second-rate boarding-house out on Ninth Street; working for eighteen a week as a bookkeeper at Stout & Furst’s clothing store; ambitious to better himself in both these latter regards – that, brought up to date, was young Bracken.

Nor was there any special significance in the intimacy which followed between these two. He visited her at more or less regular intervals. Thus early he was shaping his days into a calculated and orderly routine which remained a part of him forever after. She liked him, being at heart kindly and, considering her trade, susceptible to affectionate impulses; he liked her, being lonely, and that substantially was all there was to it.

At the end of a year he began his journey up in the world. Mr. Gus Ralph, president of the Ralph State Bank, took him on as an assistant receiving teller at a hundred a month and prospects. Unknown to the newcomer, Mr. Ralph had had his eye on him for some time – a young man of good manners and presumably of good habits, bright, dignified, industrious, discreet, honest – in short, a hustler. Mr. Ralph was on the lookout for that kind. He made a place for the young man, and from the hour when he walked into the counting-house and hung up his hat Jerome was justifying the confidence Mr. Ralph put in him. If he was continuing to sow his wild oats – and privately he was – at least he sowed none during banking hours, nor did any part of his harvesting in public, which was sufficient for his new boss. Mr. Ralph often said he had been a youngster once himself, saying it with an air which indicated that he had been very much of a youngster indeed.

At the end of six months more, which would make it about eighteen months in all, young Jerome ceased his sowing operations altogether. He didn’t fray the rope; he cut it clean through at a single decisive stroke.

“Queenie,” he said to her one night, “this is going to be the last time I’m ever coming down here to see you.”

“Well, Jerry,” she answered, “that’ll be all right with me unless you start going to see some other girl in some other house along the row here.”

“It’s not that,” he explained. “I’m going to quit going down the line altogether. I’m through” – he made a gesture with his hands – “through with the whole thing from now on.”

“I see,” she said, after a moment or two. “Been getting yourself engaged to some nice girl – is that the way it is, Jerry?”

“Yes,” he told her, “that’s the way it is, Queenie.”

She did not ask who the nice girl might be nor did he offer to tell her. In that ancient age – the latter decades of the last century before this one – there was a code for which nearly everybody of whatsoever station had the proper reverence. In some places – bar-rooms, for example, and certain other places – a gentleman did not bring up the name of a young lady. It was never the thing to do.

“Here, Jerry,” she said next. “I’ll be kind of sorry to say good-by, but I want you to know I wish you mighty well. Not that you need my good wishes – you’re going ahead and you’ll keep on going – but I want you to have them. Because, Jerry, if it was my dying words I was speaking I’d still say it just the same – you’ve always been on the square with me, and that’s what counts with a girl like me. You never came down here drunk, you never used rough language before me, you never tried to bilk me or take advantage of me any kind of way. Yes, sir, that’s what counts. Even if I don’t never see you face to face again I won’t forget how kind and pleasant you’ve been towards me. And I’d die before I’d make any trouble for you, ever. You go your way and I’ll go mine, such as it is, and that’ll be all there is to it so far as I’m concerned.

“Now then, you’ve told me some news; I’ll tell you some. I’m fixing to buy out Miss Carrie. She wants to quit this business and go over to Chicago and live decent. She’s got a married daughter there, going straight, and anyhow she’s made her pile out of this drum and can afford to quit, and I don’t blame her any, at her age, for wanting to quit. But me, it’s different with. I’ve got a little money saved up of my own and she’s willing to take that much down and take a mortgage on the furniture and trust me for the rest of the payments as they fall due. And just yesterday we closed up the bargain, and next week the lease and the telephone number and all go in my name. So you see I’m trying to get along, too, the best way I can.” She lifted the glass of beer that she was holding in her hand. “Here’s good luck!”

She took the draught down greedily. Her full lips had the drooping at their corners which advertises the potential dipsomaniac.

Face to face, through the rest of her life he never did speak to her. To be sure, there were at irregular intervals telephone conversations between them. I’ll come to that part of it later. Anyhow, they were not social conversations, but purely business.

He saw her, of course – Dyketon was a small place then; it was afterwards that it grew into a city – but always at a distance, always across the wide gulf that little-town etiquette digs for encounters in public between the godly and the ungodly. Once in a while she would pass him on the street, she usually riding in a hack and he usually afoot, with no sign of recognition, of course, on the part of either. Then again, some evening at the theater, he, sitting with his wife down-stairs, would happen to glance up toward the “white” gallery and she would be perched, as one of a line of her sisters of transgression, on the front row there. The Dyketon theater management practiced the principle of segregation for prostitutes just as the city government practically enforced it in the matter of their set-apart living-quarters. These communal taboos were as old as the community itself was. Probably they still endure.

With time, even the occasional sight of his old light-o’-love failed to revive in his mind pictures of the house where he once had knowledge of her. The memories of that interior faded into a conglomerate blur. One memory did persist. Long after the rest was a faint jumble he recalled quite sharply the landlady’s two pets – her asthmatic pug-dog with its broody cocked eyes, and her wicked talking parrot with its yellow head and its vice for gnawing woodwork and its favorite shrieked refrain: “Ladies, gent’men in the parlor!”

He remembered them long after he forgot how the place had smelled of bottled beer and cheap perfumery and unaired sofa-stuffing; and how always on the lower floor there had prevailed in daytime a sort of dusky gloom by reason of the shutters being tightly closed and barred fast against sunlight and small boys or other Peeping Toms who might come venturing on forbidden ground; and how, night-times, above the piano-playing of the resident “professor” and the clamor of many voices there would cut through the shrill squeals of an artificial joy – the laughter forced from the sorry souls of those forlorn practitioners at the oldest and the very saddest of human trades.

The one he married was the only daughter of his employer, Mr. Gus Ralph; a passionless, circumspect young woman three or four years his senior. The father approved heartily of the engagement and in testimony thereof promptly promoted Jerome to a place of more responsibility and larger salary; the best families likewise gave to this match their approval. Even so, Mr. Ralph never would have advanced the future son-in-law had not the latter been deserving of it. The elder man’s foresight had been good, very, very good. Jerome was cut out for the banking business. He proved that from the start. He knew when to say no, and prospective borrowers learned that his no meant no. Personally he was frugal without being miserly and, in the earlier days at least, he had firmness without arrogance; and if personally he was one of the most selfish creatures ever created, he had for public affairs a fine, broad spirit.

He had been brought up a Baptist but almost on the heels of his wedding he joined his wife’s congregation. She was a strict Presbyterian, and in Dyketon the Presbyterians, next after the Episcopalians, constituted the most aristocratic department of piety. This step also pleased old Mr. Ralph exceedingly.

It wasn’t very long before Mr. Bracken, as everybody nearly except his intimates called him, was chief of staff down at the bank, closest adviser and right-hand-man to the owner. In another five years he was junior partner and vice-president. Five years more, and he, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, was president. Mr. Ralph had died and among the directors no other name was considered for the vacancy. His election merely was a matter of form. With his wife’s holdings and his own and his widowed mother-in-law’s, he controlled a heavy majority of the stock.

Jerome Bracken was a model to all young men growing up. Look at the way his earthly affairs were prospering! Look at his tithes to religion and to charity – one-tenth of all he made bestowed on good causes and in good deeds; a sober man laying up treasures not only in this world but for the world to come. Look how the Lord was multiplying his profits unto him! Mothers and fathers enjoined their sons’ notice upon these proofs. Jerome Bracken’s life was like a motto on a wall, like a burning torch in the night-time.

Still, there were those – a few only, be it said – who claimed that with increasing years and increasing powers Mr. Bracken took on a temper which made him hard and high-handed and greedy for yet more authority. This hardness does come often to those who sit in lofty seats and rule over the small destinies of the smaller fry. On the other hand, though, anyone who notably succeeds is sure to have his detractors; success breeds envy and envy breeds criticism. That fierce light which beats upon a throne brings out in clean relief any imperfections of the illumined one, and people are bound to notice them and some people are bound to comment on them.

Take, for instance, the time when that young fellow, Quinn, was caught dead to rights pilfering from the petty cash. It seemed he had been speculating in a small way at bucket-shops and, what was worse, betting on the races. It further seemed to quite a number of citizens that Mr. Bracken might have found it in his heart to be pitiful to the sinner. Not much more than a boy and his father and mother hard-working, decent people and his older brother a priest and all – these were the somewhat indirect arguments they offered in condonement. And besides, wasn’t old man Quinn ready to sell his cottage and use the money from the sale to make good the shortage? Then why not let the whole messy business drop where it was? Least said soonest mended. And so on and so forth.

Mr. Bracken couldn’t see the situation in any such light. He felt sorry enough for the lad and sorrier for the lad’s family, and so stated when a sort of unofficial delegation of the pleaders waited on him. Nor was it the amount of the theft that counted with him; he said that, too. But in his position he had a duty to the commonweal and topping that, an obligation to his depositors and his patrons. He refused to consent that the thing be hushed up. He went himself and swore out the warrant, and that night young Quinn’s wayward head tossed on a cot in the county jail. Mr. Bracken went before the grand jury likewise and pressed for the indictment; and at the trial in circuit court he was the prosecution’s chief witness, relating with a regretful but painstaking fidelity the language of the defendant’s confession to him.

Young Quinn accordingly departed to state’s prison for two years of hard labor, becoming what frequently is spoken of as a warning and an example. While there he learned to make chair-bottoms but so far as might be learned never made any after his release. When last heard of he was a hobo and presumably an associate of members of the criminal classes. By all current standards of righteous men the example was now a perfected one.

Persons who found fault with the attitude Mr. Bracken had taken in the case naturally did not know of any offsetting acts of kindliness performed by him behind closed doors. Regarding these acts there was no way for them to know. Had they known, perhaps they might have altered their judgments. Or perhaps not. Behind his back they probably would have gone right on picking him to pieces. A main point, though, was that nobody berated him to his face; nobody would dare. He passed through his maturing years shielded by an insulation of expressed approval for what he said and what he thought and what he did.

This was true of the home circle, which a fine and gracious flavor of domestic harmony perfumed; and it was true of his life locally and abroad. When you get to be a little tin god on wheels, the crowd is glad to trail along and grease the wheels for you with words of praise and admiring looks. And when everybody is saying yes, yes, oh yes, to you, why, you get out of the habit ever of saying no, emphatically no, to yourself. That’s only human nature, which is one of the few things that the automobile and the radio have not materially altered.

So much, for the moment, for this man who was a model to young men growing up. It is necessary to turn temporarily to one who went down, down, down, as that first one, in the estimation of a vast majority of his fellow beings was going up and up and ever higher up.

Queenie Sears was the one whose straying feet took hold on hell. Presently her establishment had a booze-artist for a proprietor and a hard and aggravating name among the police force. They called it the toughest joint in the First Ward. City court warrants were sworn out against her – for plain drunkenness, for disorderly conduct along with drunkenness, for fighting with other women of her sort, for suffering gaming and dope-peddling on her premises.

When an inmate of her house killed herself under peculiarly distressing circumstances, sermons were preached about her from at least two city pulpits, the ministers speaking of depravity and viciousness and the debauching of youth and plaguish blots on the fair burnished face of the civic shield. When she took the Keeley Cure – and speedily relapsed – those who frequented her neighborhood of ill repute had a hearty laugh over the joke of it. She was gross of size and waddled when she walked, and her big earrings of flawed diamonds rested against jowls of quivering, unwholesome bloat.

But dissipation did not destroy the beldame’s faculties for earning money – if money got that way could be said to be earned – and for putting it by. Mr. Jerome Bracken, who had known her back in those long bygone days of her comeliness, was in position to give evidence, had he been so minded, regarding her facility at saving it up. This was how he came to have such information:

Once or twice a year, say, she would call him on the telephone at his office in the bank. Across the wire to him her eaten-out voice would come, hoarse and flattened – a hoarseness and a flatness which increased as the years rolled by.

“Jerry,” she would say, following almost a set pattern, “you know who this is, don’t you – Queenie?”

“Yes,” he would answer; “what can I do for you now?”

“Same as you done the last time,” she would say. “I’ve got a few more iron men tucked away and I’m looking for a little suggestion about a place to put ’em. And, Jerry, I hope you don’t mind my calling you up. There ain’t nobody else I could depend on like I can on you.”

She never told him, in dollars and cents, how much she had for investment nor did he ever ask. If inwardly he guessed at the possible total his guess did not run to large figures. But just as he might have done in the case of any individual seeking his counsel in this regard, he would recommend to her this or that bond or such-and-such standard stock, and she would repeat the name after him until she had memorized it and then she would thank him.

“I’m mighty much obliged to you, Jerry,” she would say. “I ain’t ever lost any money yet by following after your advice. It’s awful good of you, helping me out this way, and I appreciate it – I certainly do.”

“That’s all right, Queenie,” he would tell her, in his precise manner of speech. “I’m glad to be able to serve you. You are free to call on me – by telephone – whenever you care to.”

“I won’t never forget it,” she would reply. “Well, good-by, Jerry.”

It never happened more than twice a year, sometimes only once in a year as they – these years – kept on mounting up.

They mounted up until Dyketon had increased herself from a sprawled-out county-seat into a city of the second class. She had 100,000 inhabitants now – only 83,000 according to the notoriously inadequate federal census figures, but fully 100,000 by the most conservative estimates of the Board of Trade – and old inhabitants were deploring that whereas once they knew by name or face everybody they met, now a fellow could take a stroll on almost every street and about every other person he ran into would be a total stranger to him.

New blood was quick and rampant in Dyketon’s commercial arteries and new leaders had risen up in this quarter or that, but two outstanding figures of the former times still were outstanding. On all customary counts Mr. Jerome Bracken was the best man in town and old Queenie Sears the worst woman. He led all in eminence, she distanced the field in iniquity. By every standard he was at the very top. Nobody disputed her evil hold on the bottommost place of all. Between those heights of his gentility and those depths of her indecency there was a space of a million miles that seemed to any imagination unbridgeable; at least that seemed so to Dyketon’s moralists, provided they ever had coupled the honored president of the State Bankers’ Association and the abandoned strumpet of Front Street in the same thought, which was improbable.

A certain day was a great day for him who was used to great days. But this one, by reason of two things, was really a day above other great days. In the same issue of the Dyketon Morning Sun appeared, at the top of the social notes, an announcement of his daughter’s engagement to Mr. Thomas H. Scopes III, a distinguished member of one of the oldest families in town, and, on the front page, his own announcement as an aspirant for the Republican nomination for United States Senator.

Until now he had put by all active political ambitions. From time to time, tempting prospects of office-holding had come to him; he had waved them aside. But now, his private fortune having passed the mark of two millions, and his business being geared to run practically on its own momentum and smoothly, he felt, and his formal card to the voters so stated, that he might with possible profit to the commonwealth devote the energies of his seasoned years to public service as a public servant. Quote: If the people by the expression of their will at the approaching primaries indicated him as the choice of his party for this high position, then so be it; his opponent would find him ready for the issue. End quote.